Trivia / Mister Lonely

• Creator Breakdown: As the movie was being made, Korine was suffering a tremendous amount of drug withdrawals, burnout, and depression after the completion of Julien Donkey-Boy, with the themes of insecurity of character (hence the focus over Celebrity Impersonators) and the fear of mortality tying in with it.
  Korine: I'd been making movies since I was virtually a kid, and it had always come very easily. At a certain point after the last movie, I started to have this general disconnect from things. I was really miserable with where I was. I began to lose sight of things and people started to become more and more distant. I was burnt out, movies were what I always loved in life and I started to not care. I went deeper and deeper into a dark place and to be honest movies were the last thing I was thinking about - I didn't know if I was going to be alive. My dream was to evaporate. I was unhealthy. Whatever happened during that time, and I won't go into the details, maybe it was something I needed to go through.
• Creator's Oddball: "Oddball" being a probably incorrect word here. Aside from the somewhat odd subject matter, the movie sports very few of Korine's usual directorial quirks, and it's his only film not set in the United States or dealing with "The American Landscape", as he calls it.
• Reality Subtext: As mentioned above with Creator Breakdown, much of the film directly explores Korine's various depressions and existential fears over creative identity. To boot, he describes Michael as "a young American man lost in Paris," reflecting on how he — an American who speaks no French — chose to spend his own isolated reflection period during the early 2000's in Paris.